The United States has more than one Independence Day

Photo by Luke Michael on Unsplash

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Americans know this line as perhaps the single most important phrase in their Declaration of Independence. Indeed, that phrase, more than any other, may be what Americans might call their national creed.

But when the delegates to the Continental Congress began signing their names to the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776, this “creed” was little more than hope. For one, the existence of the United States as an independent nation did not become a sure thing until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. But, more than that, the truths that the Declaration claimed to be “self-evident,” the rights it claimed to be “unalienable” for “all men,” in fact, did not materialize in the new nation. The national creed turned out to be an idea only.

Perhaps this is why, in his Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln said that the United States was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He knew, and wanted to remind his fellow Americans, that the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence were still just that: Aspirations. Even after “four score and seven years,” the national creed was not yet the national reality.

Even a hundred years later, millions of Americans still did not enjoy the “unalienable rights” the Declaration of Independence imagined. For that reason, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the March on Washington in 1963, called the national creed a “promissory note” on which America “defaulted,” a “bad check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

Those of us who are Christians should not feel the least bit of surprise that the United States, a nation made by human beings and made up of human beings, should fall short of its own aspirations. It is a human nation, after all, and we know that human beings are sinful by nature (see Romans 7 and 8). But Dr. King, a believer and seeker of Jesus Christ, was hopeful. He said in 1963: “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation.”

I think he said this because he believed, as should all Christians, that the human capacity for sin is great; but God’s capacity for grace and love and redemption is always greater.

We have seen God’s grace and redemption at work many times over our 248 years as a nation. Americans–many of them believers and seekers of Jesus Christ, but many of them not–have done the hard work and often paid the price (sometimes with their lives) to move us closer to living up to what the Declaration imagined we could become.

Often, those who did the most good and made the greatest change were those who had little or no power.

Yet they showed us that God exercises God’s power, not through those with the greatest authority, the most money, or the strongest military or police forces; God chooses to work through the poorest and weakest. Does not the life of Jesus Christ and his disciples show us that?

So, then, the United States must not have just one Independence Day. Indeed, July 4 marks the start of a movement toward “liberty and justice for all,” but it does not mark the realization of that dream. That is why we need to remember many independence days over the course of our history. These are red letter dates that mark changes in our legal system and society. Changes that brought us so much closer to practicing what we preach in our Declaration of Independence, our national creed.

Juneteenth is one of those independence days.

It is a celebration. It is also a reminder that, as long as one group of Americans does not enjoy the full legal rights and social privileges that the Declaration imagines, then we are not yet living up to our national creed.

For Christians, it is a day that reminds us how close freedom is to the heart of God: “It is for freedom that Christ set us free” (Galatians 5:1).

So, then, may you find yourself grateful for the spirit of Juneteenth whoever you are and wherever you are this June 19. And may you devote yourself to the faith, hope, and love that it takes to keep moving toward the dream of “liberty and justice for all.”

Grace and peace.